The wonderful world of Benchmarks

[Cheesecake87]

Greetings good people of the LinusTT forums.

 

I come to you pondering a thought. Maybe you can actually make an informed choice when buying hardware; You know, to maybe save some dough by comparing performance to prices... Using the dreaded method of comparing benchmark scores.

 

My go to place recently has been Passmark ( https://www.passmark.com/ ), now many of you will probably be face palming or rolling your eyes, muttering about how Passmark results are not accurate. The reason I like Passmark is because its simple to use... This is also the reason I use it. It is really only price that makes me ultimately choose my hardware. So jumping onto Passmark and being able to use the find function of your browser to quickly jump between models suits me. Not only that you can scroll up a little and see if there is a model just a little higher that may be worth a look. Seems like a good way of working? No?

 

Well I spent a little of my day today looking up (google'ing) benchmarking, I read some posts on various sites talking about various benchmarking sites. I have since read a couple of posts saying that Passmark is not a good choice. But. What is? - Suggestions ranging from cpuboss, 3dmark and anandtech, etc.

 

Now I know enough to understand that processor benchmarks differ on the most part. Like Intel having the higher instruction per clock and AMD having generally more cores. This is excluding other CPU features and the benchmark setup its self... I suppose maybe, I'm trying to find the ultimate authority on hardware performance when there is none.

 

What is the best way of comparing? - Not even for just gaming systems, would there be a method to compare all types? - How do you do your comparing folks? - Let me know.

 

 

[PlayStation 2]

The best benchmarks are realistic scenarios.

GPU benchmarking? How about rendering a video at 1080p60 or a mission or set marker to benchmark in in a game.

CPU? Throw AIDA64 for OC stability or some other scenario you might need.

[Enderman]

1) find out what youre going to be using your CPU for, gaming, rendering, etc... and how much of each

 

2) look up all the benchmarks possible on those subjects

 

3) buy the CPU I already knew was gonna win cause I do this too much

[Cheesecake87]

9 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

The best benchmarks are realistic scenarios.

GPU benchmarking? How about rendering a video at 1080p60 or a mission or set marker to benchmark in in a game.

CPU? Throw AIDA64 for OC stability or some other scenario you might need.

 

I have just read your signature Dan. About the R9 and the GTX - This means, in theory. If you are building a gaming machine. You can save money on the processor by, buying lower end but high end on the graphics card?

 

Knowing that now makes benchmarks based on solely score for mid-high end budget gaming kind of redundant. Base on score and price alone. I would of thought buying the best of both would be the best option. Where and how do I find out more about the best configurations?

[PlayStation 2]

2 minutes ago, Cheesecake87 said:

 

I have just read your signature Dan. About the R9 and the GTX - This means, in theory. If you are building a gaming machine. You can save money on the processor by, buying lower end but high end on the graphics card?

 

Knowing that now makes benchmarks based on solely score for mid-high end budget gaming kind of redundant. Base on score and price alone. I would of thought buying the best of both would be the best option. Where and how do I find out more about the best configurations?

On the 390 vs. 970 TL;DR, it's mostly what they're most effective on. So, say, if you had an i3 and a mediocre PSU, a 970 would be the better choice, and say you had an i7-6700K and a good PSU, a 390 would likely be a better choice.

 

Best configurations are usually not too hard, and hell, they're usually stereotypical.

[Cheesecake87]

7 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

On the 390 vs. 970 TL;DR, it's mostly what they're most effective on. So, say, if you had an i3 and a mediocre PSU, a 970 would be the better choice, and say you had an i7-6700K and a good PSU, a 390 would likely be a better choice.

 

Best configurations are usually not too hard, and hell, they're usually stereotypical.

 

What would be your best advice on a good source of information for how things work together? - Where did you learn from?

[PlayStation 2]

1 minute ago, Cheesecake87 said:

 

What would be your best advice on a good source of information for how things work together? - Where did you learn from?

I kinda learned from here and from PCPartPicker.